US agents Use Phone Taps in bid to unseat UN Nuclear Chief

The US is tapping the phone of Mohamed ElBaradei, hoping to gather information that would help Washington remove him as head of the UN nuclear watchdog, and hasten an all-out effort to force Iran to give up its nuclear weapons ambitions. The State Department, the CIA and the NSA, the secretive agency that does electronic surveillance and eavesdropping, all declined to comment yesterday on the report in The Washington Post. But officials at the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which Dr ElBaradei leads, said they assumed that such practices went on. In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq it emerged that Britain and the US had tapped the phones of Kofi Annan, the UN secretary seneral, and of Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector. Dr ElBaradei is a respected and popular figure but has fallen foul of the administration of President George Bush, first for denouncing fake documents purporting to show that Saddam Hussein had sought to buy uranium in Niger, and now over Iran's nuclear programme.[more] and  [more]